"Greater Love": Wilfred Owen, Keats, and a Tradition of Desire - Critical Essay

Twentieth Century Literature, Spring, 2001 by James Najarian

The young Owen had raised himself largely on a diet of Keats and Shelley, particularly Keats, who appears repeatedly in the letters. But Owen read Keats in a peculiar way. Keats for the young Owen was the writer of Endymion, the letters, and the sonnets, not the author of the two Hyperions. Owen only mentions Hyperion once. Owen read Keats's oeuvre with massive solipsism, as if the point of Keats's work was to describe the terms of Owen's own experience. He quotes the preface to Endymion in full to his mother in 1911:

May I quote you a sentence of a Poet (need I name which?) that is marvelously expressive of all I have to say;

The imagination of a boy is healthy, and the mature imagination of a man is healthy; but there is a space of life between in which the soul is in a ferment, the character undecided, the way of life uncertain (yes!) and the ambition thick sighted (yes indeed!). (Letters 88)

Owen is reading Endymion as an autobiography. The self-conscious, affected asides are typical of Owen at this stage and underline Owen's confusion. Keats stationed the preface in front of his poem in order to account for--but not to justify--what he thought were the poem's substantial weaknesses. He suppressed a version that was much more critical of Endymion at the behest of his publisher. Owen does not read the preface as an explanation but rather as a creed. Out of this youthful fascination with Endymion Owen will mine a politics and poetics of homoeroticism. Owen's rapid poetic development is an essential part of the comparison with Keats; 1917-18 is called an annus mirabilis for Owen as 1818-19 is for Keats. The year begins with Owen's hospitalization for shell shock. In April 1917, Owen was left fighting without relief for 12 days at Savy Wood. At some point he was forced to take refuge for several days in a hole with the month-old bits and pieces of another British officer. It is not clear whether he w as hemmed in by enemy fire or unconscious for some time or paralyzed by shock. When he did return to base it was apparent to his colonel that his mental state was so bad that he had become incapable of leading his men.

Owen was hospitalized at Craiglockhart, a decayed hydrotherapeutical establishment near Edinburgh that had been turned into an experimental hospital. No two critics agree on the extent of or the reason for Owen's rapid poetic change during the hospitalization; all of the war poems stem from this period or after it. Most of the commentators on Owen attribute the change in his verse to his war experience without looking too closely at what that was. Hibberd accurately disparages the idea that Owen's war experience alone created his style and looks for a literary genesis of the change. For Hibberd, this change is caused by meeting Siegfried Sassoon. Sassoon introduced Owen to intellectual arguments against the war and to contemporary poetry and poets.

We can examine Owen's poetic, rather than psychic or intellectual, struggles by looking at the verse he began to work on at Craiglockhart. Owen's doctor, A.J. Brock, encouraged Owen to write a poem based on the myth of Heracles and Antaeas, and in this fragment we can trace the beginnings of Owen's struggle to place his sexuality in a literary context. Antaeas, who drew his strength from his contact with the earth, was crushed by Heracles in a wrestling match only when Heracles lifted him off the ground. This myth described the dilemma of the shell-shocked soldier, who was in his eyes an Antaeas who had to regain contact with his environment. But with its depiction of two Greek wrestlers, the assignment had frank homoerotic possibilities. Unwittingly, Brock had provided an appropriate literary occasion for Owen to confront his sexuality. Owen's fragment "The Wrestlers" spends little time on the mechanics of Antaeas's defeat. Instead, Owen focuses on Heracles's physical beauty and rewrites the role of his rela tionship with Hylas, his page and protege, whom he loved. At Chios, water nymphs entranced by Hylas's beauty dragged him into a spring, and he was never found. After Heracles has defeated and killed Antaeas, Heracles drops his body at the temple of Antaeas's mother, the earth goddess Gea, who brings him back to life: